Huffing and Puffing at HuffPo
In what I believe is her first exclusive editorial written specifically for Huffington Post, Yoani bursts a lot of lefty liberal bubbles by introducing same to the real Cuba:
The most important social achievements, those they incessantly boast of, are public health and education. Both reached their best moments during the era when the Soviet Union was subsidizing this experiment that we inhabit. Since then, however, the results have been very unsatisfactory. In the area of education the classrooms now lack qualified teachers, while health care is strangled by the scarcities that affect hospitals and hinder patient care. Low wages mean that many teachers and doctors prefer to work as porters in hotels, in lieu of the poorly paid labor of teaching and healing.
The dispute with the government of the United States is almost as old as the Revolution. The blockade, or embargo as I prefer to call it, is responsible for all our ills according to some, while for others it's a pretext that allows the government to exercise repression, as if we were a country besieged. For the common citizen, however, it's easier to verify the cost of the other siege, that which prevents Cubans from freely leaving and entering our own country, which denies us the economic right to create our own businesses, and which forbids our association in political parties.
Beautiful! A hard smack down. Let's see how long it is before the "progressives" who know more, of course, than someone who lives there start chiming in about Yoani being a Batistiana or a CIA plant.
It can't hurt to have somebody like her say these things, but those who are blind and deaf by choice will still find a way to rationalize away the truth. It's not as if the truth is that hard to get at or figure out, despite all the propaganda from Castro, Inc. and its foreign apologists. Everyone knows communism automatically means systematic indoctrination in the educational system, which means an education in Cuba is poisoned fruit. They just don't care. Cuban exiles have been screaming the truth nonstop at the top of their lungs for decades, but again, we're not talking ignorance; we're talking ideology and agenda.
They'll make her in to a right-wing bogeywoman yet.
I can't bear to go over there ... what are they saying?
i love how at the end of the article, you get an ad by google that asks you to support the ending of the embargo. what a coincidence, huh?